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What is memory

Authors
  • avatar
    Name
    Benton Li
    Twitter

"UHHHHHH! Chrome is eating out my memory!"

In the context of computer science, you can treat is as an interface where you can fetch a chunk of data fast.

Data are like clothes, they need a place to stay. Some clothes are worn frequently and some are not. Some are seasonable and some are worn once a year.

Data in your computer can be accessed at different levels in different media, which are mainly registers, caches, memory, and disk.

Ranked by access speed and size:

registers < cache < memory < disk

In this sense:

  • you are like registers -- but you can only wear a few pieces of cloth.
  • Your chair(s) stacked full of clothes is(are) then a cache(s).
  • Your bed tiled with clothes is a memory
  • Your closet is a disk.

What's special about memory?

  • It's volatile not like the bitcoin market -> if you unplug your computer, all data in memory is gone.